


Conversations and Expectations

by Midnight_Run



Category: Original Work, Paper Walls - Marc Cohn (Song)
Genre: Gen, Inspired by Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 17:49:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14774300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Midnight_Run/pseuds/Midnight_Run
Summary: He’s been here before... though never quite like this.





	Conversations and Expectations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosefox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosefox/gifts).



> This was a challenging prompt to fullfill, but I really enjoyed doing it. I hope you enjoy it. :)
> 
> And a special thanks to the magnificent luckybarton for agreeing to beta this one for me.

_“Want coffee?" I asked, as I headed that way._  
_"It's three thirty in the morning."_  
_"Okay. Want coffee?”_  
― Darynda Jones, Third Grave Dead Ahead

**+++**

“And then he just took the car and left,” Charlie grumbled, running a hand back through freshly trimmed hair for the third time since they'd sat down in the diner booth. "I can't believe I fell in love with such an absolute dick ."

Two cups of steaming coffee hit the table between them, their contents sloshing dangerously close to the rim with the force of the motion.  
  
"Just wave me over if you decide you want something more," the waitress commented, turning on her heel to tend the needs of the gaggle of giggling teenagers in the corner booth and their seemingly endless series of demands.  
  
The coffee smelt like burnt motor oil and probably tasted twice as bad, but beggars couldn't be choosers, Mal supposed. It wasn't like they’d stumbled across a lot of options when they’d left behind the hotel behind and ventured out into the night.

Charlie waved a handful of packets briskly through the air before ripping them open and dumping the contents into her, no, _their_ cup.  
  
He was still having a little trouble reconciling the reality with his foiled expectations. He'd had a very different picture in his head of both Charlie and how this night would go before Charlie had answered his tentative knock.  
  
He'd been expecting a girl like all the ones who had come before.  
  
A girl like the one he wished he could finally leave behind.  
  
A girl who was weighed down by the same raw, fragile edge of longing he was still nursing in his own heart.  
  
Someone sad and alone and as desperate as he was to forget what they had now that it was gone, gone, gone.  
  
What he'd gotten instead was... Charlie.  
  
Charlie, whose glower when he opened the door had knocked the ready platitudes he'd come to offer right out of his mouth, "Well?"  
  
"Uh, hi," he'd replied stupidly, staring down into reddened eyes and a splotchy face that promised swift and painful retribution if he should say a single word about either. "I'm Mal. From next door? Room 503? I, uh, we talked, just now, on the phone?”  
  
He resisted the urge to look at the number and double-check that he'd come to the right door.  
  
"Well, who else would you be at three in the damn morning?" The person standing before him sighed finally, gesturing impatiently for him to come inside. "Charlie."  
  
"Excuse me?"  
  
"My name. It's Charlie. I figured you probably already know my room number."  
  
Their short damp hair was still wet from the shower, clinging to their face in jagged clumps and sending a small army of droplets flying when they turned their head too fast and started back across the room without waiting to see if he was actually going to come in or not.  
  
He got the distinct impression that they didn't really care.  
  
Nothing was going quite how he'd imagined it would, how it usually did.  
  
He caught the door before it could close and stepped cautiously into the room as they trod across the dark hair scattered across the tiles in front of the sink, pulling the plug on a pair of clippers and winding the cord up before shoving it into a waiting bag.  
  
The room wasn't anywhere near as messy as he'd half-expected it to be.  
  
The bed was unmade, but other than that it looked almost exactly like his own room, complete with a open duffel bag tossed onto a chair in the corner overflowing with rumpled clothes.  
  
"Let's go," Charlie announced, shoving the little bag into their duffel along with the clothes that had been scattered around it.

"Go?" He echoed dumbly.  
  
"Yeah, coffee. What the hell else did you think we were gonna do at half past three in the morning, huh? Stare at each other?"  
  
He’d _had_ a few ideas about how they could pass the time, but he was pretty sure trying to tempt Charlie into his bed would have been more likely to net him a punch in the balls than anything sweeter. So instead of offering up alternatives, he'd just smiled and agreed and they'd left the room together; he, empty-handed, and Charlie with their duffel bag slung over their shoulder and a determined expression on their face.  
  
The diner had been close, which was probably the best thing he could say about it, it's bright neon sign an early morning beacon of hope for the restless and the weary.  
  
“Sounds rough,” he replied, taking a long sip of his coffee as Charlie snagged a spoon to stir in their mountain of sugar. “Whatcha gonna do now?”  
  
“Dunno. Hitch a ride back home, I guess? Hope I get there before that shithead has a chance to put all my stuff out on the curb? Hope that I have enough money to figure out somewhere to stay until I can get a new place. Start over."  
  
“That sounds rough.”  
  
“That sounds like life, doesn't it?” Charlie shrugged, slumping a little lower in the seat, cheap vinyl squeaking beneath them. “So, what do you do when you're not nosing into other peoples business?"  
  
Mal snorted, "I'm a musician."  
  
"Not a very good one if the best gig you can get is at the crossroads of bumfuck and nowhere," they snorted, taking another sip of their coffee, wrinkling their noise at the bitter taste and snagging the sugar tray to pull a few more packets to add to the candy store he'd already dumped in there..  
  
“Could be worse, least the company is good.”  
  
“Cute,” they replied, lips quirking with the looming threat of a smile. “So, what about you? Any intimate relations worth carrying on about? Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Someone extraordinary? A complete lack of interest in any of the above?”  
  
“Girlfriend. Or at least she used to be.”  
  
“Sounds like a story.”  
  
“More like a song.”  
  
“Well, if it's worth writing about, I'd guess it wasn't all bad.”  
  
“No, not all bad. Not all good either.”  
  
“They never are really,” they sighed, raising a hand to signal to the waitress. “You want pie? I'm gonna get some pie.”  
  
“It's almost four in the morning, you know that pie has probably been sitting there all day, right?”  
  
“Who cares? It's pie.”  
  
“You must really like pie.”  
  
“I really do. And heartbreak makes me hungry,” he replied as a new waitress arrived, bags beneath her eyes and a coffee stain darkening the edge of her skirt. “Hi there, can I get a slice of pie?”  
  
“Blackberry or cherry?”  
  
“Well, that's a hell of a choice. Any chance you can warm it up and throw some ice cream at it?”  
  
“I can warm it up, but you're out of luck on the ice cream, honey.”  
  
“Well, that sounds about right. Give me a slice of that Blackberry warmed up then.”  
  
“You got it.”  
  
“So, why'd you call me anyway?” Charlie asked, turning back to him as the waitress returned to the counter to grab their order.  
  
“I don't know,” he answered quickly, rapping his knuckles against the tabletop. “I heard crying when I was in the shower and I just... I don't know.”  
  
“Heard that, huh? Hotel walls are just cheap as hell, aren't they? Guess you heard all the fighting too.”  
  
“A bit, yeah.”  
  
Charlie snorted, lips twisting in something between irritation and disgust, “Well, you don't beat around the bush, do you?”  
  
“Never.”  
  
“Well, so, then between what I told you on our way here and that, I imagine you know pretty much all there is to know about my shitty day. Care to tell me your story?”  
  
“It's not really all that interesting.”  
  
“I'll be the judge of that. Spill it, songbird.”  
  
He couldn’t help laughing, “Never said I was a singer.”  
  
“And I never said I gave accurate nicknames. You gonna tell your tale or you gonna keep on dancing around it all night?”  
  
“I do have a mighty fine two-step,” he replied, smiling to his coffee as he took another sip.  
  
“Reckon you do, but that doesn't mean I’m gonna dance it with you.”  
  
“Guess not. All right, but it’s not a funny story.”  
  
“Yeah, because my tale of woe was a regular laugh riot.”  
  
“Yeah, I guess. So, I told you I was a musician, right? I play in a band so I'm on the road couple weeks every month and even when I was home I wasn't usually around much. I'd be out playing clubs or recording or practicing with the guys or whatever. And it was… it was hard, you know? I loved her, but I never saw her. She's a doctor so she worked plenty of long hours too. We’d see each other once or twice a week. And usually… usually it wasn’t anything more than a quick kiss or a quick….” he trailed off, unsure how much he wanted to share or how he wanted to phrase it.  
  
The sex wasn't the important part anyway. If it had been, they might have still been… something.  
  
“Anyway, we were… passing ships in the night, that kind of thing. Only time we ever really talked was when I was out on the road in the early hours of the morning. Right around now, actually, I'd be coming in from a show, she'd be coming off shift and sometimes we’d talk until the sun came up. It was… nice.”  
  
“It sounds nice. So, what went wrong?” they asked, offering the waitress a soft smile as she returned with a generous slice of pie and a coffee pot that she used to top off both both their cups.  
  
“Nothing, everything… I don't know," he sighed, scrambling for a reason. "It was those damn phone calls, probably. It was just so much easier to talk that way. We could be… honest with each other. Honest in a way we never were in person. I know how it sounds, but, when we saw each other, all we did was _fight_ . Her hours, my job, the dishes, the bills, it seemed like every time we saw each other there was some new complaint to add to the pile, some new gripe, some new transgression. Then I'd leave and it was like it never happened. She'd call me at two in the morning and it was like none of that shit mattered at all. Felt like whiplash. Like I was doing everything wrong and then everything right even when it felt like I was still doing the same damn stuff.”  
  
“Sounds confusing,” he commented, expression pleasantly free of judgement as he took another bite of pie. “Least Ryan and I knew what our problems were.”  
  
“Yeah, I guess," he murmured, toying with his cup, pushing it this way and that across the table before raising it to take another tentative sip, to let it burn his tongue and the inside of his cheeks as he swished it around his mouth trying to cool it before swallowing. "Next thing I knew it was over. _We_ were over."  
  
“Some relationships are meant to end I guess,” he commented, pushing the empty plate away. “You miss her?”  
  
“Sometimes. I've never been good at being alone," he replied, staring down into the still smoldering depths of his coffee.  
  
He doesn't tell him that that had been the real reason he called.  
  
Or that this hadn't been the first time he had placed a call to the room next door to his own to help pick up the pieces of a broken heart with a tussle in the sheets.  
  
The nights were long after all and hotel walls were so very thin.  
  
“Me neither,” they sighed, taking another sip of coffee. "Seems as fine a time to learn as any, I suppose."  
  
They fell into companionable silence for a time, the soft clicks and clinks and squeaks and rattles of the early morning diner serving as a soundtrack for a brief pleasant interlude in a long, sometimes unpleasant life.


End file.
